Articles with the Tag Society & Business

We live in a world that is increasingly being designed for and run by algorithms. Algorithms are highly complex computer programs that can solve problems and even determine espionage tactics, stock prices or what script will be a successful movie. An obvious, but key distinction, needs to be made here between automation and AI. Automation is just a machine performing a rote, repetitive task – like the work robots currently do on auto assembly lines. With AI, machines actually observe and learn new capabilities – on their own.

That’s the essence of machine learning. Computer programmers don’t have to write every line of code for an algorithm to execute a function; they just have to design the algorithm to learn from the “experience” of a data set. It’s not like Google’s developers wrote every line of code for self-driving cars; rather, the algorithms observed real life drivers and now draw from that database to make the right decision.

In the talks in this playlist presenters Kevin Slavin and Christopher Steiner warn that human beings are now writing code that they can't understand, and are losing more and more control of their lives by depending on complex algorithms to manage their decisions.

By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, Feb. 1, 1999

"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

At least the voice sounds amazingly like him. But it is not Steiner.

It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.

Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most memorable is Colin Powell stating "I am being treated well by my captors."

"They chose to have him say something he would never otherwise have said," chuckled one of Papcun's colleagues.

A Box Of Chocolates Is Like War

Most Americans were introduced to the tricks of the digital age in the movie Forrest Gump, when the character played by Tom Hanks appeared to shake hands with President Kennedy.

For Hollywood, it is special effects. For covert operators in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, it is a weapon of the future.

"Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things," says Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of the Information Operations department of the National Defense University in Washington, the military's school for information warfare.

Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.

To some, PSYOPS is a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping and radio propaganda. To a growing group of information war technologists, it is the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup.

Allah On The Holodeck

Pentagon planners started to discuss digital morphing after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Covert operators kicked around the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or showing other such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Iraq and the Arab world.

The tape war never proceeded, killed, participants say, by bureaucratic fights over jurisdiction, skepticism over the technology, and concerns raised by Arab coalition partners.

What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad?

But the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air Force officer asked in 1990?

According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air.

But doing so over the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over Baghdad on the order of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take a mirror more than a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and power sources.

And besides, investigators came back, what does Allah look like?

The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space … for special operations deception missions."

War Is Like A Box Of Chocolates

Voice-morphing? Fake video? Holographic projection? They sound more like Mission Impossible and Star Trek gimmicks than weapons. Yet for each, there are corresponding and growing research efforts as the technologies improve and offensive information warfare expands.

Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or words together to make a composite, Papcun's software developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations.

The irony is that after Papcun finished his speech cloning research, there were no takers in the military. Luckily for him, Hollywood is interested: The promise of creating a virtual Clark Gable is mightier than the sword.

Video and photo manipulation has already raised profound questions of authenticity for the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not only journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy-minded who will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too distant future.

William M. Arkin, author of "The U.S. Military Online," is a leading expert on national security and the Internet. He lectures and writes on nuclear weapons, military matters and information warfare. An Army intelligence analyst from 1974-1978, Arkin currently consults for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, MSNBC and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

What I’m talking about here are your most profound desires and goals. And often you have to search for what those are, because they don’t just pop up.

That’s the kind of work I’m referring to—the work that comes when you launch projects and enterprises that directly reflect those desires.

Why expend enormous amounts of energy if the work is superficial? Why spend years if the work is automatic and dead?

Making your work known in the world begins with knowing something about the work. It begins with knowing you have unlimited energy to give to it. That energy comes from discovering/inventing your deepest possible goals, and their many dimensions and implications.

Then, the energy shows up in abundance.

But it can all go to waste without commitment. Commitment is not something that happens naturally. It doesn’t float in on a breeze. It doesn’t show up as a gift under the Xmas tree. It’s a choice. Yes or no. Every day.

Some people have doubts about whether their work is worth being known and visible in the world. Those doubts are spurious. They’re based on not having found a profound objective and purpose.

Skills and strategies can be learned. But their basis and root are in you.

Excuses for not doing what I’m alluding to here are endless. People make them up by the ton. Postponement Inc. and Distraction Inc. are flourishing as never before.

It’s even fashionable to be confused, and then parlay that into a solid story of irreversible victimhood. But,…

“Inspiration is outside state control.” —Kenneth Clark

“The practice of a profession entails discipline, which for me meant the production of two thousand words of fair copy every day, weekends included. I discovered that, if I started early enough, I could complete the day’s stint before the pubs opened.” —Anthony Burgess

“They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.” —Eric Hoffer

“Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.” —Jack London

As you can see, what I’m discussing in this piece moves light years past the notion that, by simply thinking “positive thoughts,” the universe will magnetically deliver success.

“There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun. This lone word makes them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing. They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

CREATE is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug boredom of the soul.

CREATE is about what the individual does when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

CREATE is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.” —The Creative Center, Jon Rappoport